Adventures in Filmmaking

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Monthly Archives: July 2014

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Rycote windshields are awesome and essential tools that should be in all filmmakers kit box. I had a couple of badly damaged rycote’s, so I decided to bite the bullet and attempt repairing both.

One windshield had suffered trauma to the basket at both ends and along the middle, badly cracked staved in and split. I decided I would need two different methods of repair for each end. One end had clearly taken many blows from being dropped on its nose and the domed front end was badly cracked. The other removable end had also suffered trauma from being dropped but rather than cracking at random points in the basket weave it had sheared at the intersection of the weave, maintaining the full lengths but flapping about making it very fragile and prone to deforming.

I decided the removable dome rear end could be repaired with needle and cotton thread, by sowing a criss cross stitch at every point where the basket weave previously intersected. This is a simple but time consuming technique. I used a tiny dob of super glue on the cotton thread to reinforce it and prevent the thread wearing or loosening over time.

I found sewing through the exterior and securing the thread on the inside made for the tidiest and visually most pleasing repair.

It ends up looking a bit ugly on the inside but who cares, it wont effect sound quality and nobody is going to se it in use anyway!

Once I had sewn all the sheared intersections of the dome it became much firmer and reassuringly robust.

Here you can see all the sewn joints from the outside and inside, this part of the job is DONE!

Next job is to fix the front end dome which was so badly cracked it had totally deformed and was concave in places instead of convex! Sewing wasn’t an option as there wasn’t enough complete structure there to make it work. I had to form new lateral strands for the basket weave. For this i decided the best bet was a hot glue gun!!

I used some rolled up socks forced into the inside of the basket to gentle push the dome end out back into its natural shape so i had a rough hemisphere with which to built my new lattice work of glue on.

The round ring type structure that helps to give some strength and shape to the basket was also cracked in 4 different places around the circumfrence. I also repaired this with hot glue.